What was a privilege of enterprises just a few years ago, now becomes a common thing for companies of all sizes – I’m talking about cloud. The number of cloud storage providers grows, delivering various solutions that fit the needs of different organizations in terms of features and prices. Moreover, the competition in the cloud market is getting tougher, making cloud storage providers cut their prices just to stay afloat. Therefore, cloud becomes a really great alternative to purchasing more physical storage or compute resources to maintain data and applications. However, despite there is a wide range of cloud offerings, we still struggle with choosing a cloud provider that offers us storage we need without charging us a steep price in the end of the billing period. So today, we’ll have a closer look at some public cloud providers to decide on the cheapest storage.

Well, hyperconvergence is certainly a good deal but there are certain factors to consider when choosing a hyper-converged vendor. Support is a number one thing you should be looking for. Basically, decent support increases chances that your production remains operational all the time or at least minimizes the downtimes. Unified management is the “core” of hyperconvergence, so make sure you won’t need any additional software for administrating your hyper-converged infrastructure. Finally, the price. Take your time and calculate if you’re not overpaying just for a vendor’s “logo”. So, there is a wide variety of hyper-converged appliances, but I hope these three simple factors will help you with choosing a vendor that will provide you with the one that will serve you faithfully.

Typically, snapshots are used to return a virtual machine to its previous state in case of any errors during updates or configuration changes. Thus, they will save your system from unpredictable failures. But please, do not consider a snapshot as a backup and vice versa! Let’s be honest, snapshots are not backups. Each snapshot is associated with a certain set of indices (or a single index) to refer other blocks on the disk. If the corresponding storage goes down, you’ll lose all your data because you’ll be unable to restore everything from a snapshot. Based on this, be smart and do not rely on them and use the proper set of tools for backups. In other words, use a hammer for nails and screwdriver for screws.

Server virtualization helped businesses increase productivity and efficiency of their IT infrastructures by abstracting physical servers’ workloads from the underlying hardware with little to no loss of functionality, VDI applied quite the same logic. Desktops and applications run inside virtual machines that are hosted centrally, either on a server or in the cloud. The purpose of VDI is to deliver fully-featured user desktops to a variety of devices including conventional PCs, thin clients, and even zero-client endpoints. But how something that was seen as a bright alternative to the traditional server-based computing model used by Citrix and Microsoft Terminal Services a decade ago ended up being a niched deployment?

We’ve all heard the expression “time is money” and you can’t put it better when talking about IT. Most businesses’ success and efficiency depends on their IT infrastructure. For real. We all want our applications to run as fast as possible and roll them out in a matter of minutes. Moreover, the more data you have, the worse the consequences are in the event of its loss. So, companies want to get back all their data and get it back as soon as possible in case something happens. That’s called Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the shorter they are, the better it is for your company. Finally, as your business grows, you want to provision it with the right amount of storage and capacity and in case you need to open another branch office, you want to deploy an IT infrastructure shortly without spending months for building it.

VMware ESXi is the industry-leading hypervisor that is installed directly on a physical server. It is a reliable and secure solution with a tiny hardware footprint. At the same time, ESXi architecture is easy in management, patching, and updating. Recently, Mellanox has released iSER 1.0.0.1, the stable iSER driver build for ESXi. iSER is an iSCSI extension for RDMA that enables the direct data transfer out and into SCSI memory without any intermediate data copies. Here, we study the driver stability and performance to understand how the protocol streamlines ESXi environments.